Question

I have data in a simple txt file, a trying to query it (to put it in a table) but when I use

select *
from OPENROWSET('MSDASQL',
       'Driver={Microsoft Text Driver (*.txt; *.csv)};DefaultDir=C:\DB\;Extensions=TXT;',
       'select * from data.txt ');

I get the rows but all are NULL because (i think) there is no field terminator and is in UTF-16LE format, in the TXT all the fields are know by the character count, example:

FIELD1FIELD2FIELD3FIELD4FIELD5FIELD6
FIELD1FIELD2FIELD3FIELD4FIELD5FIELD6
FIELD1FIELD2FIELD3FIELD4FIELD5FIELD6
FIELD1FIELD2FIELD3FIELD4FIELD5FIELD6

To make things even worse, the file is in UTF-16LE but I need it in UTF-8 (or change the format within sql 2005) so that openrowset will work

And when I use

SELECT * FROM OPENROWSET ( BULK 'C:\DB\data.txt', SINGLE_NCLOB) AS BinFile  

I get all the data but in a single row 🙁

Thanks in advance

ps: also used sp_addlinkedserver and didnt work

Answer 1

Thank you guys for your time and brains to try to crack up this problem, finally got it solved with:

SELECT 
    SUBSTRING(F1, 1, 19) col 1
    ,SUBSTRING(F1, 20, 19) col 2
FROM OpenRowset(''Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0'',   
     ''Text;HDR=NO;CharacterSet=unicode;Database='+@path+';
     Extended Properties="Excel 8.0;HDR=Yes;IMEX=1" '',JOURNEY_PLAN#txt);

SUBSTRING to get the data from a file that is not limited by nothing

CharacterSet=unicode to enable the DB engine to read from a specific character set of the file

Thanks!!!!!!!!!

ps: In http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb177651.aspx found the details on the attribute “CharacterSet”, the bad thing is that in the manual for OPENROWSET dosent says a thing about this http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190312.aspx >:(